


Giles Marlow's One And Only

by Ankaret



Category: Chalet School - Brent-Dyer, Marlow series - Forest
Genre: Crossover, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-13
Updated: 2009-12-13
Packaged: 2017-10-04 09:42:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 14,254
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ankaret/pseuds/Ankaret
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giles Marlow brings home a bride, Con finds a friend, and Nicola and Patrick dance together at a wedding.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

"But why _Malta_?" asked Lawrie Marlow for approximately the forty-third time since that morning and approximately the four hundredth since they'd heard the news.

"Because his ship was there, you goop," said Nicola, reaching round Lawrie for a hairbrush that was on their joint dressing-table.

Lawrie had decided that the occasion warranted makeup, and windmilling-arms burrowing into every wardrobe and cupboard in the house in search of one particular pale blue top that was the only thing possible for her to wear; Nicola took the view that as long as she was _clean_, nothing much more mattered. "But will she... I don't even know what they _speak_ in Malta."

"She's English," said Nicola, feeling a fierce tightness in her throat. Had she really not _explained_ this to Lawrie at least once before?

Lawrie turned, hands arrested in the motion of clipping on a pearl earring. "You _care_, don't you? About Giles getting married. Ro does, too."

"Don't be a feeble clot. Ro says she _knows_ she's only been managing Trennels until Giles came home, she's always known. She probably couldn't be gladder."

"But _you_ mind," persisted Lawrie. Nicola was deeply tempted to swat her with the hairbrush. "He was always your particular brother. It's odd, isn't it? I don't have a particular brother. Peter isn't _anyone's_ particular brother, unless you count Fob, and I don't, do you?"

"Oh, put a sock in it," said Nicola, and stomped off out of their shared room, towards the relative sanctuary of downstairs.

Ginty was visible poking aggrievedly through the airing-cupboard at the end of the passage, dressed as far as stockings, skirt and camisole, all new last October from her going-to-Exeter trousseau. Nicola had suggested at the time that it needn't be _quite_ as lavish considering that Ginty hadn't got into Oxford after all, and had received a glare from her sister and an _Oh, Nicky, don't be tiresome_ from their mother. "Have you seen my blue top?" she demanded as Nicola emerged.

Nicola weighed up the rival loyalties of sister and twin and decided that Lawrie could do her own dirty work. "What does it look like?"

"Oh, very funny har har. It's _blue_." Ginty grabbed triumphantly at a silky blue triangle of something visible under a pile of tea-towels, and then made a face when it turned out, transmuted by the cold light of the passage, to be a ribbon-edged pillow-slip.

"Wear that," suggested helpful Nicola. "New fashion."

"I thought you were in the Sixth, not the Second." Ginty pivoted on her stockinged heels to look at the bedroom once Karen's, then Rose and Fob's, and now assigned to the person who Peter very irritatingly insisted on referrring to as The Young Master's Bride. The rose-sprigged curtains had been washed and pressed, and the room smelt of laundry and beeswax. "I wonder what she'll be like?"

From Ginty, that meant _I wonder whether she'll like me_, probably with a good deal of calculation at a sub-surface level that Gin wasn't willing to admit even to herself concerning whether upstaging a bride at her own wedding was possible or prudent. Nick shrugged. "I can't see Giles picking out a gorgon, if that's what you mean."

"Mum said she wanted to invite her old _headmistress_ to the wedding. And _scads_ of school friends. The two who are bridesmaids with Rose and Fob are the _little sisters_ of school friends, which I think is the weirdest thing ever. I mean, if I   
needed a bridesmaid - " Ginty shot a quick look at Nicola, reassured herself that no mockery was forthcoming, and continued, "I wouldn't fix on Jenny Cardigan."

"I shouldn't think you'd want to. She turned up last term with her hair in purple spikes. Keith very nearly had kittens," said Nicola with a reminiscent grin. "If I was getting married, I wouldn't ask Keith, that's for sure." She was going to add that it was all like Charlotte Brontë having her headmistress give her away, but _that_ brought back memories of Gondal, and she didn't want to discuss Gondal. Certainly not with Ginty, at any rate.

There was a knock at the door. Nicola went off to answer it. She discovered, bounding up and down on the doorstep, her sister's stepson Chas Dodd, hair slicked down into a state of unnatural tidiness, and clad in a boiled-shirt ensemble that perversely rather suited his extreme thinness. His sister Rose was a few steps behind him in a depressingly smocked party frock and a palpable miasma of nerves.

"Nacker!" said Chas, bouncing ecstatically. The resemblance to a half-grown puppy was irresistible, particularly around his newly outsized feet. "How do you make a Maltese cross?"

Nicola supposed it was _nice_ that Chas was still as sunny-tempered as ever, at an age when Peter for certain had retreated into sullen adolescent worriment about things that sisters couldn't possibly understand; but she couldn't help thinking it was a bit _peculiar_. Perhaps Kay and his father and Fob between them contributed all the gravitas that it was possible for one house to hold and Chas just had to go and do some other thing. All the same, it was a bit much, to have one's relatives being _cheerful_ about the prospect of being cooped up inside making polite conversation on a perfect, brisk spring morning with the wind just stirring the tops of the elm-trees. She got quite enough of that kind of thing from Ann.

"How do you make a Maltese cross?" Chas persisted joyously. "Guess!"

"I don't know."

"Give him a dose of castor-oil! I don't know why that's funny," Chas admitted. "But I thought it might make her feel at home, sort of thing. Fob thought she'd be black all over, but _I_ said she wouldn't, she just might be a bit sort of yellow, and if she _was_ we wouldn't mention it."

"She's English," she said Nicola resignedly. "At least, I think Mum said she was at a school in Switzerland or somewhere, but she's certainly not _from_ Malta, she just met Giles there. You're early, you know."

Chas was not put off so easily. "I know. Methren said it was better than the other thing, and we were to come straight over here and not dawdle."

"Fob decided she wanted to wear her beetle costume. Methren's helping her put it on," supplemented Rose.

Nicola considered the very grown-up sherry party that was to greet Giles and the future Mrs Giles - her thoughts somehow shrank from imagining the woman as anything more than a vague outline - and decided that Fob dressed as a beetle was not actually likely to be any _more_ of a social liability than Fob dressed as anything else. "It'll never still fit her."

"That's what Kaykaren said, but Fob wanted to try. No one's going to make us dance, are they?"

"What?"

"At the _party_. I said I thought Rose and I were a bit too old for balloons and stuff, and Kay said it was a grown-up party. If I do have to dance I'm not dancing with anyone but Rose, because she knows how my feet go. Or you, p'raps," added Chas, obviously entirely for form's sake.

"Will we have to go and look at the horses?" asked Rose, making it sound like being dragged to an auto-da-fé at the very least.

_Oh, dear_, thought Nicola, seeing all the ways how Chas and Rose's definition of _a grown-up party_ differed from Mrs Marlow's. "It'll just be people standing about talking," she said as gently as possible. One really required Ann for this kind of thing. But Ann was off on errands around the village and meeting people at the station, and the infant Dodds were here _now_. "No dancing. Sausages on sticks and cheese nibbles and so on. Lemonade for you and Rose, I s'pose."

"Oh well," said Chas philosophically, evidently prepared to make the best of the sausages on sticks. Rose actually looked relieved. Nicola suspected that Rose thought that kind of party was more likely to offer opportunities to slip upstairs and read than the more organised alternative. She was inclined to wish Rose luck with it, except that it was only likely to lead to Edwin laying down the law and Rose looking desolated, because it always did.

Nicola ushered them inside, only to find Rowan putting the phone back in its cradle with a slightly steamrollered expression. Nicola's mind jumped ahead - it was all off and Giles was broken-hearted; or, worse, something had happened to the plane bringing them both, only surely that would have been on the News... "Who was that?"

"Ask me no questions and I'll tell you no lies," said Rowan briskly. "Hello, Chas. Rose. Go and see whether Mrs Bertie will let you have a bit of the catering on account. That was a Mrs Maynard."

"The one who's singing at the wedding?"

"_Ça juste_." Rowan gave Nicola a short, speculative look. Nicola met it brassily. She had never been so relieved as when she heard that the future Mrs Giles had a friend who had practically brought her up, and who sang; if _she_ never had to stand up in front of an attentive cathedral-ful of faces in pews and sing again, she'd be quite happy about it. "She seems very... helpful. Offering to arrange to put people up, and so on."

"But they don't live near here?"

"No, she lives in Switzerland, but apparently... Oh, _I_ don't know. Something to do with another friend of hers, and someone who knows the Merricks through the church they go to in London, and I think there was an Austrian Countess involved somewhere."

"How properly fab. I didn't know they were as grand as all that. Though I suppose... schools in Switzerland..."

"Grandmama did offer once to chip in to have Ginty finished," said Rowan negligently. "I think Mum told her that she so much preferred her as a work in progress, as that way there was at least some possibility of improvement."

Nicola gave her sister a suspecting sidewise look. "Do you know what she was doing in Malta?"

"Archaeological dig, I think someone said."

"At least she'll be able to talk to Edwin, then."

Rowan looked dubious.

Upstairs a loud argument had broken out over the ownership of the disputed blue top. A landing higher still, Mrs Marlow opened a door and said in an end-of-tether voice that wasn't quite a shout, "_Will_ you all be quiet? Nicola - Rowan - one of you come up here and help with my zip - "

"Not me, gel," said Rowan, moving negligently towards the decked-out dining-room. "Someone has to open the sherry."

"I could open the sherry."

"Teach that in the Sixth these days, do they? I should have stayed."

"Aren't you going to..." Nicola indicated the row between Lawrie and Ginty, which was continuing in hisses. There was a sound of ripping fabric. The noise resumed; Lawrie clamorous, Ginty indignant.

"Good Lord, no. Whyever should I?" said Rowan, looking astonished, and made good her escape.

Nicola hurried upstairs, and was ushered in to fiddle with the narrow, elderly zip on the back of her mother's frock. The frock was very bought-in-Paris indeed, and part of an ensemble that had come out twice before in Nicola's memory - once for Kay's last Speech Day and once for dinner with the Lord Lieutenant of the County. Mrs Marlow held her hair out of the way with one hand and rifled through her wardrobe with the other for the dress's matching jacket. "Honestly, clothes aren't safe in this house, Lawrie and Ginty are like a pair of _gannets_..."

"Oh, _no_, Ma! Gannets are _much_ more appealing!"

Mrs Marlow dragged the jacket triumphantly out from behind a tubular sable coat with a huge shawl collar, and slapped unavailingly at it to try to remove the clinging hairs it had acquired. "It looks like Tessa's been sleeping on this... here, Nicky, take the clothes-brush, _you_ try..."

Nicola sat down on the worn satin counterpane of her parents' bed and did her best with the clothes-brush. Mrs Marlow was poking around in a jewellery-box, in what Nicola had only over the last year or so come to recognise as her version of a tremendous flap. "Those art glass things you've got on already are awfully nice," she ventured.

"Your father bought them for me in Naples." Mrs Marlow seized triumphantly on a pair of large, ornate, Victorian gold bracelets. They glowed in the early Spring light through the window, like pirate plunder. "_Here_ we are!"

"Those?" They were quite splendid, Nicola thought respectfully, but they and the jacket and dress had so little to say to each other that she might as well have been staring at Miss Cromwell in a Carmen Miranda headdress. "I like the art glass ones better."

Her mother was looking at her as if she was being quite unbearable. "Nicola, please for once in your life don't be so _dense_. Put your hands out."

Nicola did so, feeling an absurd desire to say _it's a fair cop, guv_. The bracelets slid onto her hands and rested there, heavy, utterly fabulous, and utterly _her_, just as The Disaster had been the moment she saw it in a mirror.

"And now they're _given_ to you, and no one can say they ought to be an engagement present," said her mother, sounding rather out of breath, and looking rather guilty and about the same age as Ann. "I'd give one to you and one to Lawrie, but they're a set... Nicola, do stop staring at me like that and go _away_, and let me get my breath and put my shoes on. Who was that at the door?"

"The infant Dodds."

There was another, much politer, clamour downstairs at the door. Mrs Marlow made shooing motions and dived back into the wardrobe in search of shoes.

Nicola headed out at a prudently leisurely pace, waiting to see whether someone else would let themselves in for the hostessly huha before she got down there. Unless it was someone she _liked_, of course. It might be the Merricks, and a chance to have a quick word with Patrick... She leaned over the banisters and had a look.

It was Ann, shepherding in a little knot of people. One dark, elegant head _did_ belong to Mrs Merrick, but she was squired, inexplicably, not by husband or son but by her nephew Ronnie.

Ginty dashed past in second-choice black, shoving Nicola against the banisters. Nicola said 'Oi!' and 'Careful!' and slowed her feet down further, deciding that Ann and Ginty between them had it well in hand. None of the other heads looked familiar, though it was hard to tell with nothing to go by but an occiput and a pair of foreshortened shoulders. She supposed they must be destined for the other side of the pews in the Minster.

She wandered downstairs slowly, admiring the bracelets on her wrists, and wondering whether they would have been Rowan's if Ro had answered their mother's summons. Lawrie would be as indignant as only Lawrie could be... She slipped in at the side of the dining-room and surveyed the situation.

Ann was smiling, confident and cheerful, asking one of the visitors - a Miss Barras, apparently, with a pleasant face and hair the colour of Jenny Cardigan's before she attacked it with the purple paint - about a sketching trip to the Western Isles. Then there was a studentish man who looked as if he might be Miss Barras' brother, and another two men, tall and fairly nondescript, who seemed to be discussing medicine. Nicola caught Ann's eye, and supposed, reluctantly, that she really _ought_ to be introduced. The alternative was either to go and interrupt Ginty, who was being very confidential with Ronnie Merrick, or to push in on Patrick's mother, who was talking about Bach and the Austrian Alps with a sharp-featured, intimidatingly elegant woman with a small boy of about Fob's age in tow. "Oh - you only have one, too?" she was asking in a very social voice as Nicola passed. "Honestly, isn't it a _blessing_?"

"Miss Barras, this is Nicola, another one of my sisters - Nicola, this is Miss Barras and Mr Barras, and Dr Sheppard - his wife's over there with their little boy - and Dr van Eyck, who works with him at the Sanatorium." said Ann. Nicola ducked her head and grinned and nodded. Another wave of visitors arrived, causing Ann to hurry off and greet them, and leaving Nicola to make polite conversation about how no, she wasn't a prefect yet, maybe next year, and yes, their uniform _was_ scarlet, which fortunately led into a long digression about how the school Miss Barras had attended and Mrs Sheppard used to teach at had swapped over from brown to sapphire blue and the founders had _considered_ scarlet but thought it wouldn't suit girls with red hair.

"I don't think Miss Keith worries about that kind of thing," said Nicola dubiously. "I mean, I think it was scarlet all along, but they changed to navy to make it easier because of the War and it took a while to get it changed back..."

_That_ led to more stories, and something about a Peace League that sounded, truthfully, more like Ann's kind of thing than Nicola's. More guests filtered in. Dr van Eyck drifted off to talk to Ann again. Nicola was joined by Lawrie (who was clearly, visibly torn between making an entertaining impression on the visitors and dragging her sister off to conduct a searching enquiry into the matter of bracelets) and then by some people from Guernsey.

A car drew up outside. Nicola looked towards the doorway, wondering whether it was Patrick and his father at last.

It wasn't. It was Giles. Nicola felt, once again, a stab of pride, looking at him; she felt he dragged the entire family standard _up_, just by existing. It was a pity he couldn't be in uniform, but she supposed he would be for the wedding. There was a glad forward fuss towards him and the young woman on his arm.

She was, Nicola had to admit, much more decorative than Edwin. Taller, too, with a general resemblance to the cover of one of the Guide magazines that Ann used to read and then dutifully pass on to the less fortunate; not pretty, but handsomely wholesome, with curly dark blonde hair and deep blue eyes, and an admirable complexion. Chas would be disappointed, thought Nicola over her pricklings of dismay. She tried to tell herself that this was _nonsense_, that she would feel this way about _anyone_ outside the family who commanded Giles' full attention without being a ship. Though there was something noticeably ship-like about Miss Trelawney, she thought, watching as she carved her way through the crowd like a destroyer under full steam to shake Mrs Marlow's hand and bestow a beaming smile on Fob, _not_ after all in the beetle costume and visibly in the sulks about it.

She supposed she'd better go and be introduced.

"And this is Nicola, and Lawrie - " said their mother, sounding flustered.

"Oh, twins? I suppose you're Nicky for everyday? And what's Lawrie short for - Laurentina or something like that? I'd be Lawrie, too," said Miss Trelawney with an even friendlier smile. "You can't make a boy's name out of Mary-Lou, worse luck!" She was turning back to Mrs Marlow and explaining that she knew plenty of twins, and some of her best friends were triplets, and that Mrs Maynard was planning to finish her family off with quads.

It was no good. They didn't take to her at all.


	2. Chapter 2

It was half past seven in the evening, and Lawrie Marlow was both bored and hungry. She'd never have imagined that being in a room full of so many attractive women could be so dull. Mary-Lou must pick her friends for looks, she thought, rather like Miranda - there _was_ something definitely Miranda-like about her air of cool-handed competence - except that she seemed to have got stuck at the Sandra Grigson stage.

There were only two women amongst them who looked _distinguished_ as opposed to merely decorative. Of those, one was a Professor of Classics, which was enough to make Lawrie sheer off, sharpish. It seemed to have the same effect on Kay, who was hovering at the other end of the room. The other was the Mrs Maynard who was supposed to be singing instead of Nick. She had the most gorgeous, big, Latimer-deep dark eyes - only the colour of dark chocolate, rather than milk - and a speaking voice that rivalled Lois Sanger's, but she had a really unbecoming way of doing her hair. Besides, she had written a lot of books that Lawrie had never bothered to read, and she wasn't letting herself in for any _more_ of that kind of thing, not after Kempe and The Lord Of The Rings and The Tempest. _Caliban_, thought Lawrie, triumphantly resurrecting the grudge, with much the same feeling as one finding a dusty and one-armed teddy-bear under one's old childhood bed.

"Did you ever act Shakespeare?" she asked, more or less at random, of the girl she was talking to.

The girl, a Katharine Something who had been talking enthusiastically about tennis, looked slightly surprised but replied politely. "Sometimes we did scenes from Shakespeare as tableaux. For form evenings. Instead of progressive games, and so on."

_Scenes from_, thought Lawrie, repelled. Katharine and the Chalet School alike sunk in her estimation. She abandoned Katharine forthwith. This left her alone with nothing to do but think about how hungry she was. The possibilities of party eats had long since been exhausted. Or, at least, they hadn't, but there was a limit to how many small sandwiches even Lawrie could casually swipe without _someone_ making a noticing remark. She looked hopefully round at the side tables for the prospect of Doris showing up with fresh regiments of sandwiches or perhaps delicious small hot things on toast.

No such thing appeared. Lawrie slid off to take a short cut round to the scullery door and try the kitchen. It was full of Mrs Bertie and Doris in an angry fluster over supper. Lawrie thought it was worth a try anyway. She leaned herself ingratiatingly through the doorway. "That smells good," she said enthusiastically, by way of propitiation to the household spirits.

"Oh, get along with you, Miss Lawrie, you'll spoil your supper," said Doris, emerging red-faced from the oven and shutting it with a bang.

"Could I have just a bit of bread-and-scrape to get along with? And maybe a _smidge_ of delicious fishpaste...?"

"I'll give you fishpaste," said Mrs Bertie, not showing any sign of doing any such thing. "I'll tell you what you can do, young Miss Lawrie, you can go and ask your mother exactly how many of Miss Trelawney's friends I'm expected to feed. I've put some macaroni on to help the vedge along a bit, and I can always slice the roast a bit thinner, but if she wants individual fruit cups, she needs to tell me how _many_ individual fruit cups, or someone'll end up with all pear and no cherries."

Lawrie was about to beat a very sharp retreat when another girl appeared at the kitchen's other door, the official green baize one at the end of the passage. She had dark hair, tied back. She looked to be two or three years older than Lawrie, tall and slightly unsure of herself, but _not_, Lawrie thought, in that drooping Karen-way that came of being the tall one in a medium-sized family and not wanting the attention - this was something entirely different, something that came of an inner uncertainty projected onto the outside. Except that she looked interesting. And Lawrie _never_ found anything interesting in people who wore their inner uncertainties on their sleeves, generally classing them instead as dim wet drips who could stay out of _her_ way in case they fell and she tripped over them.

"I wondered if I could be any help," said the girl. "I know there's rather a lot of us. I'm quite house-trained, really." She gave a swift, self-deprecating smile. "Do you need someone to wash up, or stack trays?"

"Get along with you," said Mrs Bertie, in considerably softer tones than Doris had used earlier. "There's barely room in this kitchen for two, let alone three. How many of you _is_ it staying, miss - Miss?"

"Con Maynard," said the girl obligingly, answering the question in the second interrogative _miss_. "Oh - Mother and Charles and I, and Clem and Tony and Verity and Alan. Aunt Grizel's taking all the small fry back to the hotel in Colebridge."

"Seven," said Mrs Bertie with grim relish. "_And_ Mr and Mrs Merrick and Mr Ronnie and young Patrick, I make no doubt. You'd better pull out the trestles on the big table, Doris, and go and get that other canteen of silver."

"I haven't seen Mr Merrick or Patrick," offered Lawrie.

"He'll show up when he smells food," said Mrs Bertie, doing her old family retainer bit like anything, Lawrie thought disrespectfully. "I always _said_ he was just like Blackie..."

"That's no way to speak of an M.P." said Lawrie, and giggled.

Mrs Bertie shook her head. "You know what I meant, young Lawrence... Here, you can take the rest of this apple pie, it'll never go round again, and I don't suppose it'll spoil your supper any more than it's already _been_ spoiled by eating bits of salty rubbish all afternoon..."

"Not _rubbish_, Mrs Bertie, no one could call _your_ cooking _rubbish_," said Lawrie, playing shocked and entertained at once. "And _besides_, I was terribly good, I left it all for the visitors..." By Mrs Bertie's softening expression, she judged it safe to enter the kitchen. She wove her way deftly through the chaos, snatching up the apple pie, and fetching up next to Con. There was a spare bottle of sherry hanging around on a small table that was usually used for trays, so she snabbled that too, on account. She smiled at Con in her friendliest way. _Mother would want me to be nice to the visitors_, she thought, being virtuous. "Come and sit with me on the back stairs and share this? There's too much for me on my own, and if I don't eat Mrs Bertie's dee-licious roast and vedge and macaroni this evening it'll be stocks and pillory."

"Stocks-and-pillory?" asked Con, raising a dark eyebrow.

Lawrie widened her eyes at her. "_Terribly_ stocks-and-pillory."

Con looked back through the door at the party as if it didn't hold that much appeal for her either. "Well, I suppose in _that_ case..."

Lawrie gave her the sherry to carry. "You don't strike me as at _all_ the sort of person to offer to help out in kitchens, if you don't mind me saying so. Or are you very particularly good?"

"Oh - well - we were all brought up to be useful,"

"So were we," said Lawrie, pantomiming deep gloom. "Ghastly, isn't it?"

Con looked at her sideways, as if not quite sure how to take this. "I just did what Len would have done if she'd been here."

"Who's Len? One of the doctors? Oh - wait, you said _she_..."

"My sister. One of my sisters. We're triplets."

Lawrie sat down leggily on the stairs and looked properly impressed. "Really triplets? Are you identical? Or two identical and one not? I saw a programme once with two who were identical and one not, and it made me think I'd hate to be the one."

"Oh, we're not identical." Con disposed herself tidily beside her, all long stockinged legs and neat skirt. Her hair turned out to be long, and knotted on the back of her neck, in a way that Lawrie suddenly found herself _much_ preferring to the likes of Mrs Merrick's French pleat and Ann's everlasting boring bun. Con looked slightly weary, as if she had this conversation a lot. "We _were_ when we were little - and we all had red hair - but we turned out different."

"I _wish_ that had happened with me and Nick," Lawrie gave a long sigh for glories foreclosed on, and divided up the apple pie. "Aren't the others here?"

"No. Margot's fearfully busy - she's training to be a medical missionary, you know - and Len's gone to Scotland with some university friends and her fiancé." Con considered. "Aren't you and your twin and Ginty _like_ triplets, though? I mean, all being so close in age..."

Lawrie shook her head, appalled at the very thought. "Not really. There's a brother between us. He's off on his ship."

"Daddy was in the Navy..."

"Oh," Lawrie let out the breath she'd been holding, and smiled. "Well. That's all right, then."

\--

Nicola had finally remembered where it was she'd heard of the Chalet School before. It had been tickling at the back of her memory all afternoon; and then, whilst chatting to Dr Herrick (who she really hadn't expected, though it wasn't a _bad_ surprise, now she'd got used to it) she'd suddenly recalled it being mentioned by Miranda, who knew everything school-related.

Miranda had been irritated with Tim about something, and had said - Nicola remembered her tone of voice precisely - that it was a pity Tim hadn't been shipped off to that place in Wales like Miss Craven's niece. Nicola had ungrammatically asked "What Miss Craven's niece?" and it had come out that there had been a Phyllida Craven a couple of years above Kay but that she'd left for the Chalet School after only a year or so on Junior Side.

Nicola thought she'd try mentioning her to Mary-Lou. Except that it turned out that Phil Craven was the one person, apparently, in the entire history of Mary-Lou's schooldays, who she _hadn't_ liked, for reasons that didn't come out very clearly at all except for something to do with Phil's brilliance at Maths; and Nicola, thoroughly discomposed, took herself off to recuperate in the library.

She realised as soon as she had opened the door that this was no place to be, either. The flat evening light was coming through the window and competing with the green-shaded lamp on the desk, one throwing sharply circumscribed bluish shadows and the other fusty brown. Giles was sitting in one of the fat armchairs with his quarter-deck face on; Mrs Marlow was in the other, lighting a cigarette, and Rowan was sitting at the desk looking grimmer than either.

"Well, you thought wrong," Rowan was saying, flatly, as Nicola entered the room. "I'll happily teach the woman what little I know between now and September, but after that I'll be in Colebridge every day for my draughtsmanship course, and I expect I'll bring home work in the evenings."

"Oh - sorry - " said Nicola and prepared to depart again. Rowan fixed her with a boding look. "No. Stay. It'll be one less person to _explain_ to, later."

There was no arguing with Rowan in that particular frame of mind. Nicola pulled up the tall steps that were the only remaining available sitting-place, and made herself as inconspicuous as possible.

"I know you always said you wanted to be an architect," said Mrs Marlow.

"Did it never occur to any of you that I meant it?" asked Rowan with exquisite politeness.

"It's not me who makes the final decisions where the farm is concerned," began Giles in a conciliatory tone of voice that nevertheless sounded to Nicola as if he couldn't see any possibility except getting his own way at the end of it. "It's Father..."

"That's completely disingenuous and you know it."

"_Rowan!_" said their mother.

Giles picked up the slack again in the shocked silence. "Look - I'm at the beginning of my career and M-L's at the beginning of hers. It isn't reasonable to expect me to come home. It isn't financially... Look, I thought you wouldn't _mind_, Rowley. I thought you were happy to carry on. Anyway, it's not as if she'll even be _here_ a lot of the time, she'll be off on digs and expeditions - and when she _is_ here she'll be a help, she has her own ideas - "

"Has she indeed."

"It seems to me," said Giles, his handsome face going suddenly very like their father's, "that you're not being very fair to Mary-Lou."

"_Fair_," said Rowan scornfully. "You let me think you were coming home for good - "

"There was no _letting you think_ involved. You simply assumed it. I suppose," said Giles in a tone of voice Nicola had never heard him use before, "that you're going to remind me now that you've spent four years of your life running this farm for me, and - "

"You suppose dead wrong," said Rowan, kicked her chair back against the bookshelves and walked out of the library.

\--

"If you want the truth, it feels like I'm just there to make up the numbers," said Con, taking a long swig of the sherry. "I mean, Len's so dashing and straight and a born leader, and everyone says Margot has the real brains _and_ the real looks, and I'm - just - well - _there_. Like Len's the head and Margot's the heart, and I'm the spleen, or something."

"I'd like to be a spleen," said Lawrie dreamily. "Or an appendix. Or a vestigial tail." She twirled an imaginary tail to make Con laugh. "And honestly - if people _do_ keep saying your sisters are prettier and cleverer than you, they can't ever have looked at you properly. Or they looked once, and you were two years old and covered in jam, and they never bothered looking again."

"But they _are_," said Con earnestly. "Prettier - not that that matters - _and_ brighter. And all my friends - Ruey and Ricki and people - seem to be Len's cast-offs."

"I know that one," said Lawrie bitterly. She reflected on the first weeks of their first term, when Tim had preferred Nicola. And on the unpleasantness that had spilt out, last term, during their first and only blazing row, which had been sparked off by Tim catching Lawrie being entirely too confidential with Barbara Wateridge in what was very accurately known as the Drama Cupboard; when she discovered that Tim had never _stopped_ being drawn to Nicola, since for Tim, though not for Lawrie, it evidently wasn't necessary to want to be friends with the people one was attracted to. Tim, rather perversely, had apparently found Lawrie's _liking_ the buxom and uncritical Barby to be just as culpable as the question of whether or not Lawrie had been undoing her buttons.

Con drank some more of the sherry. There was no longer any apple pie left to soften its fall. "The person I _really_ like is Ted - Ted Grantley - but Ted likes Len. It's just like everyone else. I'm _twenty_ and they still think of me as this dreamy-eyed little girl. There's this story - Mama never stops telling people - about a Scripture lesson, and how I said Daniel bit the lions. Sometimes I think that if I have to hear it one more time I'll _break_ something."

"I know about bishes in Scripture lessons, too," said Lawrie reminiscently. "I say, who's Ted? Not your sister's fiancé?"

"No, a girl. She was at school with us."

"If you don't mind me saying," said Lawrie, "I do think it's a bit _weird_ that you all went round answering to boys' names."

Con's dark eyes sparkled. "Not at all like you and your friend Tim, then."

"Not a bit," Lawrie swiped the bottle. "And _anyway_, it _was_ just me and Tim. It wasn't as if Berenice insisted on people calling her Bernard, or Jean had to go pronouncing it like she was French and a boy, or - or Esther suddenly wouldn't answer to anything but Zedekiah."

Con leaned against her, warm and giggling. "I can just see the Abbess's face if a new girl pranced up to her and said _Call me Zedekiah, won't you_?"

"Esther wouldn't prance up to anybody. She's like you. Beautiful but doesn't notice it, so other people don't, either."

"Oh, don't be silly." Con rested her head on Lawrie's shoulder. "I do feel, though - I feel as if I'm not me on my own, I'm just part of them. Do you feel that way, sometimes?"

"No," said Lawrie, finding it honestly outside her own experience. "I mean - when I was little, I used to think Nicola was part of me." Her arm found its way round Con's waist. "Don't you think it was rather nice, though? I mean - like _practicing_, for finding your way to other people, once you grew up, and..." She could smell perfume, and Con's soft hair.

"Get up off those stairs, you pair of disgusting little objects," said her sister Rowan.

Lawrie scrambled to her feet, more or less climbing up Con to do it. The empty pie-plate and the nearly empty sherry-bottle clattered away down the stairs. Rowan stopped the bottle with her foot and looked up at them under her pale brows, her face and voice cold with fury. "Go and stick your horrid young heads under the pump and then tell Mrs Bertie I said to give you a flask of black coffee, and don't come to dinner unless she passes you as sober."

Con went peony-red. "I'm so sorry!"

"You and everyone else, I'm sure." Rowan paused, clocked the put-up hair and the grown-up shoes, and realised that she'd just unleashed her worst strain of sisterly sarcasm on an adult visitor. "Oh. I didn't realise who it was at first, Miss Maynard. Forgive me," she said in a constrained tone of voice. "I must have mistaken you for one of your younger sisters."

"What's happened?" asked Lawrie pertly, recognising that Rowan was in more of a bate than could be accounted for just by her and Con, and also that Con's visitorly status afforded her some protection from the storm.

"Ask Nicola," said Rowan curtly.

"Cor! What's Nicola done?"

"You are growing perilously close to too old for that wide-eyed act," said Rowan swiftly and cuttingly, leaving Lawrie with her mouth open and an awful reappraisal of her own character and actions going on in her head. Had people been laughing _at_ her, then? Was she a bit of a joke, like that peculiar woman who came in to take Jography when Mrs Bellamy was away with an appendix, who had worn pink frills and spoken with a slight lisp? She knew people said, indulgently, as they always had, that she was still a baby; she was now suddenly prey to doubts as to whether she was, and whether, if so, it was worse to be that, or the other thing. Was she _consciously naive_, like that horrid heroine in I Capture The Castle, a book she'd borrowed from Ginty and not liked much?

Rowan regarded her with some grim satisfaction. "As I said, you can ask Nicola. If I have to explain it again I shall seriously consider getting drunk on the stairs myself. And as for the rest of it, Mr Merrick's just arrived from fetching Patrick back from university, and Patrick says he's left."

"No," said Lawrie, hugely interested. "Has he? He always said he just wanted to stay here and..."

"Yes, well, his father had other ideas. And now they're here. They were wrangling in the hall when I last saw them. And Mrs Bertie's having conniptions over the fruit cup," said Rowan savagely. "_Isn't_ it going to be a pleasant supper?"


	3. Chapter 3

Whatever Patrick had been discussing with his father before supper, it was plainly not finished with yet, but only in abeyance. Patrick mimed despair to Nicola with his eyebrows from where he was stuck at the other end of the table with Charles Maynard (though Charles in himself, tall and charming, didn't seem like an actual penance - he was planning to be a monk _and_ had a sense of humour, which struck Nicola as a limited miracle) whilst Mr Merrick talked gallantly to Mrs Trevor, Mary-Lou's miniature and very dishy sister-by-marriage.

"Stepsister," said Lawrie informatively, when this relationship was revealed to her.

"We're _not_ stepsisters," said Mary-Lou kindly. "My mother married her father. They're both with God now - "

"Oh dear, how sad," said Ann, passing the potatoes; and then collapsed into a blushing pother, _exactly_, Nicola thought with a critical eye, as if she thought God was listening to every word she said.

" - so we're sisters-by-marriage."

"Excuse me, but that's the exact definition of stepsisters," said Ginty over-sharply, emboldened by the indulgent admiring presence of Ronnie on her left. "Unless you mean you're not stepsisters any _more_ because the people who made the step aren't around, and I don't think it works like that."

"Well, maybe it's different on the Continent," said Mrs Marlow hastily, turning to Miss Barras. "Oh dear - Clem - I'm afraid I quite thought _you_ were the stepsister - "

"Sister-by-marriage," put in Mary-Lou.

" - do forgive me, and will _someone_ explain how it all fits together again?"

Somehow this led to Mrs Maynard discoursing on how she'd acquired all her various wards and hangers-on, one of whom she seemed to have fished out of a train crash and another from what sounded to Nicola like a house of ill-repute, though surely it couldn't have been, and then to a discussion of the wedding arrangements. "We were super lucky to get the Minster at such short notice," said Nicola a little too enthusiastically, trying to do her bit.

Giles' eyes crinkled as he smiled; and then he turned the smile on Mary-Lou, and it grew even warmer. "Preferential treatment, I expect," he said lightly. "Sisters having sung and acted there, personal friends of Dr Herrick - "

"I don't know why you didn't ask me to sing," said Mrs Trevor in her small, very clear voice.

Mary-Lou looked embarrassed. "Well, I thought you were so busy with the children - "

Mrs Trevor raised both silvery eyebrows. "And Joey isn't?"

Mary-Lou laughed. "Well, Joey's a bit different, everyone knows - "

"I'm sure there's room for us both," began Mrs Maynard.

"No, there isn't," said Giles. "They want us out by four. Another wedding." Mrs Maynard looked slightly surprised, as if she wasn't used to being contradicted.

Ann hastily began discussing the flower arrangements, at the same time as Tony Barras asked whether there were any views worth sketching in the neighbourhood and Mrs Merrick swooped down like a handsome bird of prey to admire Nicola's bracelets.

"Where did you get those?" asked Ginty covetously. Nicola wished she could hide her hands under the table. Lawrie started loudly rehearsing her grievance again; they were _twins_, they should have had one _each_.

"They look like they've always belonged to you," said Patrick with a quick glancing smile that rose like the glint of gold out of deep water; so _that_ was all right, then, and enough to see Nicola through the rest of the meal.

\--

"What on _earth's_ happened?" she demanded of him under cover of stacking plates.

The dark brows lowered. He appeared to be watching Ronnie and Ginty, and taking little satisfaction in it. "I've just left, that's all. The fees, and the cost of keeping me in digs - "

"But didn't you have grants and things? I thought you were rather particularly clever."

"I try to keep the family flag flying," he said lightly. "No grants for sons of Conservative M.Ps. And the way things are at present with stock prices, and the cost of land drainage... Well, it just seemed much more sensible for me to get a job somewhere. Learning my trade, if possible. But Father thinks - "

"Father thinks this is _neither the time nor the place_," said Mr Merrick with a patina of joviality that was clearly all for Nicola's benefit. "Come along, Ronnie. What did you do with Helena's coat?"

They went out into the hall to look for it. Rowan said "I think it's upstairs on Ann's bed," and went to look; as she hurried up the stairs, it struck Nicola that she looked ten years older than she had that morning.

The hall was full of firelight, shadowing the high beamed roof and casting sherry-coloured light across the tiled floor. Mr Merrick was standing hands-in-pockets, talking to Mrs Maynard about Catholic services in the neighbourhood. "You're not Catholic?" Charles asked Nicola politely.

She looked up, surprised to be part of the conversation. "I've been to Mass a couple of times with Patrick."

"Why don't you come again tomorrow? If your parents don't object, of course. Or come to tea at the hotel, before we go? It's just that - well -" He looked across at his sister. "It's not often Con makes her own friends."

"That was Lawrie," said Nicola. She was long past feeling irritated at that particular mistake, but she still felt vaguely bereft; as if something large and half-seen had reached out a hand to her and then snatched it away. "I mean - Con seems nice, but I didn't get a chance to talk to her much."

"I'm sorry. I'm sure you must get this all the time."

"Pretty much." She gave him a small, tucked-in, visitor-issue smile and watched them go, in a hospitable bustle of farewells and lights and coats and a sharp light chill from the open door. She thought, if it wasn't sacrilegious, that with his dark hair and those rather splendidly intense grey eyes he really would be wasted as a monk. Nicola wondered whether that was Con's particular brother, then, and whether Lawrie had been right when she said Giles was hers.

"Come along, then, M-L," said Giles himself, suddenly, as if summoned Ariel-like by her fireside thoughts. "Doris or someone will have unpacked for you. It'll be an early start tomorrow. I want to get off to Wade first thing after church, and show you the Minster."

"Early starts suit me. I can't stand wasting half the morning yawning over a book." Mary-Lou smiled at him, and put her hand in his arm as they went up the long sweep of the stairs. It was a confident gesture, as if her hand with its newly resident family diamond belonged there on Giles' sleeve and nowhere else. The firelight burnished her hair. Nicola felt an almost tearful, babyish resentment, and put it down to the sting of firesmoke in her eyes and too much wine at supper. There was Giles, and there was Mary-Lou, who in six weeks time would be _young Mrs Marlow of Trennels_, and, by the time some descendant came to draw family trees in the next millennium - supposing the atom bomb or land tax hadn't done for them all by that point - would be more of a Marlow than Nicola was.

"What's wrong?" asked Lawrie, coming up nudgingly to sit beside her on the settle.

"It's like that frightful fiancée in The Grand Sophy, that's what it is."

"She's more like Sophy for looks," said Lawrie unhelpfully. "But I do know what you mean. _What_ a shame there isn't a cousin for him to marry, and to bring us monkeys."

"Monkey yourself." Nicola stared after them, feeling more like ten than seventeen and unable to think what to do about it. They turned the corner into the shadows of the long first floor corridor, and she almost thought she saw Giles turn to drop a kiss on Mary-Lou's head. She turned back to Lawrie, fiercely not looking. "Isn't it all going to be ghastly?"

"They didn't make you sing in the Minster after all, did they? I wasn't listening," admitted Lawrie. "I suppose you'd be a... a compromise."

"No, I wouldn't. And don't you suggest it," said Nicola swiftly. She looked into the fire. Outside, she could hear the convoy of Merrick and Maynard cars finally getting away. She leapt to her feet.

"Oi!" said Lawrie, knocked half off the settle.

"I've just had the most _miraculous_ thunk," said Nicola, eyes blazing. "I'm going to talk to Rowan."

\--

"I'm sorry, Nick," said Rowan, when Nicola managed to corner her the next day out on the farm. "I'll _ask_ Dad when I write. But I'm fairly certain he'll say that if we _do_ hire a farm manager, it should be someone experienced."

Swallows swooped over Old Pasture. The cows were mostly clumped at the other end by the pond, tails down and shoulders humped, looking for all the world like Mrs Bertie and her cronies at a jumble-sale. Tessa danced at Rowan's feet, occasionally shoving her cold nose up under Nicola's hand to show she wasn't forgotten.

Rowan stared off over the meadow; then back at Nicola, and made a visible effort, as Nicola gloomily noticed, to be kinder. "I'll _try_," she said again. "But I honestly think it'll be no go. I suppose one _could_ argue that maths and science A-levels have an application when it comes to soil, but..."

"But Patrick knows all about local conditions," Nicola pressed. "He'd come _cheaper_ than an experienced farm manager. And you wouldn't have to worry about him making himself indispensable so he'd got a - a cosy billet, or running the farm into the ground for the sake of the next year's profit."

"I do think I was a little harsh on farm managers as a species when I said that," reflected Rowan, staring out again over the pasture towards the edge of the brindled sky.

Nicola hesitated. "Can't we - is it that we can't afford _any_ kind of farm manager, _and_ the wedding and your course?"

"Bless you, no," said Rowan unexpectedly. "You have no idea what a difference it makes only having one set of school bills to pay instead of four. There was a while back there when I thought we'd have to write to Keith and ask if she'd give a discount if you did your own washing."

"I know," said Nicola, made uncomfortable with memory.

Rowan gave her a swift look. "Yes, I imagine you do. And Ann's pretty much independent now - the problem's making her keep some of her salary for herself, rather than handing it all over to Ma. I keep telling her there's no _possible_ reason why she should sponsor Ginty's extravagances in Exeter. Peter needed his uniform and sundries, of course, but now he's joined his ship - "

"So we _could_ hire Patrick?"

"You are the faithful one, aren't you?" asked Rowan, only half amused. "The problem I have, apart from Patrick's lack of experience, is that Daddy might very well think that we were interfering unforgivably in Mr Merrick's affairs."

"Oh, no! He couldn't be so _feudal_!"

"I don't say I wouldn't sooner have him following me about asking questions than I would Mary-Lou," said Rowan finally. "Just don't set your hopes on it, all right? And don't go round crowing painedly that you thought it was all _settled_, when it doesn't come off."

"Like I would." Rowan wandered off to examine a hole in a hedge; Nicola remained, standing on one leg. "Ro."

"_What_?"

"_When_ will you write?"

"First thing Monday, will that do you?" Rowan looked back over her shoulder. "And Daddy's coming home for the wedding, so I suppose if you _really_ must, you and Patrick can put your case to him then. He'll probably be so startled that it's the farm manager job you want to talk to him about - "

"_Don't_," said Nicola gruffly, prickles of embarrassment running up and down her spine. "Anyway, I haven't said anything to Patrick."

"You _haven't_?" Rowan looked astonished. "I suppose it's probably for the best."

Nicola supposed, as she trudged off gloomily back towards the farmhouse and the possibility of elevenses and hot chocolate, that that meant that Rowan really had meant what she said; though Rowan _always_ meant what she said, so Nicola couldn't think why she found it necessary to dissect it. She took a detour round the stables and found some sugar in her pocket for Chocbar, the only hopeful equine nose that came looking for it; evidently her mother was too busy that morning to ride. Nicola found herself wandering if Mary-Lou rode, and if so, whether Trennels or the hire stables would be expected to provide for her. She was taller and heavier than Rowan or Ginty, and clearly Chocbar hadn't been offered, so...

"Good morning," said Mary-Lou herself, cheerfully, coming out through the sunlit yard. "It is Nicola, isn't it? We thought we'd save the Minster for this afternoon, after all, and combine it with the appointment with the Registrar. Giles' ship is his parish, so Wade has to be mine - I don't mind, I've always been a bird of passage. Do you think it's warm enough for tennis?"

_Not hardly_, thought Nicola, mentally pulling her jacket closer around her. "It might be by this afternoon," she said politely. "The court doesn't get any light in the mornings."

"Giles said you were the one who was good at sport? And Lawrie the one who acts. I'd like her to meet the Carews - they're actors, their daughter's at our finishing branch."

Nicola looked impressed. "Oh, I think we saw him at Stratford once. Lawrie will be over the moon." _Giles had said she was good at sport_, she thought, keeping it inside her like a warm secret. Well, there was nothing for it. One didn't want to be like Peter, glaring at Edwin every time he saw him, _still_, after all these years. She smiled, and made a consciously friendly effort. "How did you and Giles meet? I know his ship was in Malta, and you were on a dig."

"Oh, yes, the old Knights. It was - well - rather humbling to see the places where they'd kept their faith alive all those years," said Mary-Lou, looking up at the table-mountain rise of Rum Beacon which was visible over the stable wall. Nicola wondered whether she'd seen an aeroplane, though she couldn't see anything of the sort herself. "It was rather a funny story, actually - this kid pitched into the bay, so of _course_ I dived in after her, and Giles must have dived in after _us_, and even though there he was in his tropical whites, the first thing I said when we got to dry land was _are you a doctor_?"


	4. Chapter 4

Joey Maynard had always made it an ironclad rule that she would make time for her children when they came to her with their troubles. So, when Con turned up shyly at the door on the morning of Mary-Lou's wedding, Joey sent Cecil and Felicity off to the Minster with Len rather than escorting them herself, and sat down on the chair at the very upright dressing-table that the Railway Hotel, Wade Abbas, provided in its rooms. "Why don't you draw one of those cushions over and sit down by my knee?" she suggested. "Just like you used to when you were a little girl."

Con sighed and did so. Already, the situation was slipping away from what she had planned, but she didn't want to hurt her mother's feelings by refusing. Her mother's hand stroking her shiny dark hair felt vaguely vexing, like a child's patting that might turn to pulling at any moment.

"What is it, my lamb?" enquired Joey in her lovely, flexible voice. "Did you take my advice and try to get an interview with Dr Herrick? I'm sure the College paper would be interested..."

Con didn't tell her that the student paper at her university college was run by a clique of very confident young women in tight black sweaters and dirndl skirts that owed a lot more to New York than to Tirol, and that she had ventured into their brightly lit sanctum exactly once. They had been _kind_ \- they'd even invited her along to a coffee bar afterwards, where she'd had nothing to say, though at least the coffee was surprisingly cheap compared to the price in Switzerland - but the paper was full of in-jokes, squibs about politics and scribbly cartoons, and the only poetry it published was satirical. She couldn't see any of the careful stories or articles she'd written for the Chaletian fitting in; as for showing her poetry to that sharp-nailed crowd, the idea made her curl up inside and squirm. "No, it's nothing about Dr Herrick."

"Would you like _me_ to talk to him?"

"Honestly, no, Mama, it's nothing like that. I went and offered to help out with the food at Mary-Lou's engagement party... I thought it was what Len would do... well, Len would have been looking after the children, I suppose, but Giles' sister Ann was doing that..."

"Don't _waffle_, Con, it's a bad habit," said Joey gently. "I thought you'd grown out of your dreaminess now, my big girl! I do like that Ann. Something about her reminds me of Frieda. Theo van Eyck likes her too, I can tell you that! I did wonder whether he had an eye for you, but now I can see that it's Ann for him or nothing. Did I tell you about the doctor who wouldn't take no for an answer the year I went to Coorg?"

"Yes, I think you might have done, Mama," said Con, desperately docile. "No, it's nothing to do with Ann either. Their versions of Anna and the co-adjutor didn't need me, and I - found myself - on the stairs talking to Giles' _youngest_ sister. Lawrie. The scholarship one."

"Oh, pouring her heart out to you, was she? That was well done of you, Con. I'm sure she must have felt a little bit pushed out, before she met our own Mary-Lou, of course! I was just the same when Dick got engaged - I wasn't very sure I liked the idea of Mollie. Of course it was all silliness. I hope you told her that."

"Well, actually she was the one giving advice to me. She said that - well, she implied that she thought it was a silly idea for me to feel that I was there to make up the numbers with Len and Margot." Con buried her blush in the unyielding bamboo side of the chair. "And that if anyone said I wasn't beautiful, they hadn't looked."

"I should hope she did!" said Joey indignantly. "Surely you've never thought that way! Your father and I have had our trials with all of you, of course, but I didn't think we'd brought any of you up to be a set of self-pitying Moaning Minnies! Of course we wouldn't want you to be _vain_ \- not that there's any chance of that, I shouldn't suppose, with a cousin like Sybil in the family, and Cecil bidding fair to give her spades and aces when she grows up - but you were always taught to be thankful for the healthy body God gave you. If you could see some of those poor souls in the hospital in Innsbruck... It sounds like this Lawrie child gave you very sensible advice, and what's wrong with that?"

"Well - it's - she - " Con tried to gather up her tangled feelings and present them in a form that would be acceptable to her mother. She'd had twenty years of practice at this, but somehow it never got any easier. "She put her arm around me and I think she was going to kiss me. I _wanted_ her to kiss me. And I told her about how I've always thought such a lot of Ted."

"Why shouldn't she kiss you? You're practically family. I can tell you, I'd kiss Robin if she popped up at this wedding, which she won't, vows of obedience being more important than anything like that," said Joey lightly. "Was that all, my honeybunch?"

Con struggled. "I... Well, I just wondered, whether... I mean, she's a lot younger than me..."

"Oh, you wondered whether it was going to turn into silly schoolgirl business? We've always sat very hard on that kind of thing at the Chalet," Joey mused. "When I think of how Simone used to carry on, and of that poor Tom Gay when Rosalie decided to fall in love with her..."

"Yes. Tom Gay." Con sat up and squeezed both her cold hands together in her lap. "You do like Tom, don't you, Mama? We all do. You don't think there's anything wrong in the way she lives, do you?"

"_Tom_? Gracious, no! I don't say it'd do for everybody, but London needs missionaries every bit as much as Darkest Africa does, my precious lamb!"

Con sat back on her heels and relaxed. "Oh. I wasn't sure you'd see it that way, Mama. I'm sure Daddy's sometimes said... Well, when Lawrie and I were sitting on the stairs, I just thought it might be like... like _The Well Of Loneliness._ That's all. I'm sure it was silly..."

Joey looked absent-mindedly into the mirror and adjusted her hat. "I don't think I've read that book. Did you borrow it from the San library?"

"No. Emerence lent it to Margot, just before Margot decided to join the Soeurs and go all out for a big adventure."

Joey frowned. "It wasn't full of cheap boy-and-girl nonsense, was it? You know I don't like to think of you reading that kind of thing."

Con wished she still had a fringe cut in her hair to hide behind. "Oh, no. Nothing like that. It's about - about friendship."

"Ah." Joey smiled kindly and prepared to give counsel from on high. "An Australian book, I suppose. That would account for why I didn't know it. Now, I don't know this Lawrie child either, but I'm sure from what you've said that she's _exactly like Emerence_."

Con's eyebrows flew up. This was all proving much easier than she had thought. She should, she thought, with a slight downward feeling that she wasn't sure how to identify, have _known_ that Mama would understand. After all, hadn't Mama often talked about pairs of ladies who lived together, like the Stuffer and Maria? She wasn't sure how much anyone but herself and Len had seen of the stormy passages between Emerence and Margot over Margot's decision to enter religion, but surely nothing around Freudesheim escaped Mama's eye. And now here she was, not condemning Emerence or Lawrie at all... "_Really_, Mama?"

"Yes, I'm sure she is. She's probably very young for her age. It can happen with long families - look at the Ozanne twins! - though we've always been very careful to see that nothing like it touches Phil and Geoff. She might be seventeen, but inside she's probably no older than thirteen or fourteen, and you know what a tiresome age _that_ is! She's probably fallen for you just as hot and strong as Emerence did for Margot."

Con felt as if her chest was entirely filled with something hot and stuffy and she couldn't breathe. "Do you think so?"

"I _know_ so, my sugarpie. I'm not one of the world's great brains, I thank God, but I _do_ know girls!" Joey stood up and gave her hat a final pat. "If she's the sort of girl who won a scholarship to a school like Kingscote, I'm sure she won't stay at the silly stage long. And she'll have Mary-Lou there to keep an eye on her, of course. You be kind to her, my sweet, but make sure you make time for grown-up friendships with people like Ted, too. I know Ted's Len's friend, but Len's never been selfish with her friends, you know!"

"I know," said Con dully. She was being given leave to care about Ted. No one had said any of those awful words like _hysterical_ or _invert_ that she'd read in her father's books. She ought to be delighted. She certainly oughtn't to be feeling squashed that it had come, like everything else in her life, wrapped up in praise of Len. She _loved_ Len.

But not, she realised with a catch in her throat like sudden cold air, the way she loved Ted.

\--

Len Maynard slipped into Wade Minster by a side door that led to a passage. It was cold, and smelt of stone. There was a half-open door further up, and sounds behind it that sounded like they came from a large rafted space.

"This is really _strange_," said Cecil critically. "How are you supposed to say hello to God if you go into his house the back way?"

"I think it's nice," said Felicity shyly. "God's a friend, you don't have to stand on ceremony with Him. It's like people coming to Freudesheim through the garden."

"Not much like a garden today," said Len easily. So far, Wade Abbas hadn't impressed her much. She supposed, unselfconsciously, that she was lucky, in that her life had mostly been spent in beautiful places. The Railway Hotel was an upright Victorian spinster of a building, ungiving in matters such as adequate light in the bathrooms and on the stairs; and whilst the rest of the town at least seemed _cheerier_ in the brisk late-spring breeze, the Minster still rested in an unlikely setting of concreted-over, odd-shaped car-parks and cafés that had warm light behind the windows but smelt of tomato sauce. She wondered where the Kingscote girls went on rambles. Not, surely, through those streets...

"Hello? Anyone there?" She pushed the door further open. Cecil stared, open-mouthed, at the sight of two girls she'd never seen dressed exactly like her; though surely, Len thought, she must have had exactly the same experience when she first put on a Chalet school uniform.

One of the girls looked to be thirteen or fourteen, the same age as Felicity; she was attractively sturdy, with a pretty complexion and long, thick butterscotch-brown hair, and looked more like a sister of Mary-Lou's than a distant about-to-be-connection by marriage. The other looked a couple of years older than eight-year-old Cecil. The frilled lemon satin that suited dainty pale Felicity and dark-haired Cecil and, now, the third, brown-haired bridesmaid, did not suit her at all, and probably wouldn't have suited her even if it had been big enough and if she wasn't red-faced with fury. She was standing, fists on hips, and shouting at someone behind a curtain. "Come _back_ and do up my zip!"

"Here, let me try," Len knelt down beside her. A triangular expanse of plump, freckly back gaped between the strained jaws of the zip. "I'm Len. What's your name? I say, you must have grown since this was made. My sisters and I were forever growing out of things, and it did _not_ make Mama love us, I can tell you! I bet you'll be a six-footer when you grow up. Do you go to Kingscote Junior Side?"

"I'm Rose Dodd," said the other girl, with shy but pretty manners. "She's my sister Phoebe."

"_Fob_," said the child, wiping tears with an angry fist from her short brown lashes. "Peter calls me Fob."

"Well, we must have you all pretty for Peter, then, mustn't we? Breathe in..."

"Breathe _out_, you mean. Breathing in wouldn't make any sense," said Fob.

Another girl emerged from behind the curtain. She was wearing a very short purple dress, but with, Len was relieved to notice, a cardigan over the top, and had curly blonde hair done up at the back in a chignon and long earrings. Her eyes were more green than blue, and tilted up a little at the corners. She was carrying a small gold bolero in her hands. "Here, Fob. Nick's friend Miranda went and made love to the school dressing-up closet and got you this. Something to do with a production of _The Little Drummer Boy_ when Kay was in the Thirds, apparently."

"But we won't _match_," said Cecil.

"I don't care," said Fob mulishly.

"Perhaps if you hold the zip together at the top and I pull - " suggested Len. "I'm Len. I know you must be _one_ of Giles' sisters - are you Ann? Dr van Eyck's had nothing to say for weeks except how pretty you are. It makes a change from before, he only ever used to talk about ways of treating tuberculosis."

"I'm _Ginty_," said Ginty. She looked at Fob with rattled disfavour. "I suppose it's worth a try."

The stitches where the zip was set made ominous creaking noises, but held. "_There_," said Ginty on a whoosh of outgoing breath. "Now go and sit over there quietly with - um, I don't know what your sister's called. The little dark one."

"Cecil. It's short for Cecilia Marya, after..."

"... with Cecil, and don't move, and don't so much as have a drink of water."

"I'll have to move afterwards," said Fob flatly. "I'm going to dance with Peter."

Ginty said nothing, reflecting on how _weird_ Fob's devotion to Peter was - almost frightening, really, it made one think that she would trudge off into the snow after him without another thought, like that child in the fairytale. For that matter, Peter's flattered forbearance was pretty weird in itself. She reckoned he _would_ dance with Fob, too, despite his usual resolution to dance only with females up to the standards of the Fleet and _outside_ his own family.

Felicity and Rose were sitting shyly on little wooden chairs and talking about netball. "Well, _they_ seem to be enjoying themselves, at any rate," said Ginty. Her plans for the morning had involved a long rose-water bath and a phone call to Ronnie, not being roped into shepherding Kay's young. "Didn't Con say you were the engaged one? Can I see your ring?"

Len looked conscious. "We're not _officially_ engaged yet. When I finish Oxford."

_Oxford_, thought Ginty. It was a hard, descending pain that caught her unawares, even if she just caught a glimpse of the Radcliffe Camera on the television. "That's a bit dreary," she said lightly. "I'd have said _you hand over a whopping great rock or I'll consider myself footloose and fancy-free, matey_, if it was me."

It was meant to be a joke; clearly, for Len, it wasn't one. She looked discomfited. Ginty felt the memory tucking itself, bat-winged, away amongst the belfry of things that came and flapped at her in the night, and the thought of it made her momentarily dislike Len. "I was very young," she said stiffly. "He asked my father whether he'd - whether he could spend a lot of time with me, when I was sixteen. He'd known me since I was two or three."

"Gosh, how romantic," said Ginty. "I mean, how fab of him to know what he wanted so young."

Len gave a little reviving smile. "Well, he's not _so young_. He was already qualified as a doctor by then. He's eleven years older than I am."

Ginty managed _not_ to say _how dreary_ again, but it was a close-run thing. "Kay's husband - these ones' father - he's twenty-two years older than she is," she offered.

Len looked constrained again, as if, Ginty thought, she'd never thought of her dreary old doctor in _those_ terms, though in Ginty's opinion it was about time she did.

She sat there beside Len, and thought about Ronnie asking permission of her father, probably in the study at Trennels; _a soldier and a sailor_, she thought, her mind making a Victorian picture of it, and putting Captain Marlow in uniform and herself in a fetching off-the-shoulder crinoline number. Ronnie, of course, was in his Brigade of Guards uniform; Ronnie was just Ronnie, and ever more should be so, world without end, amen.

\--

"Don't you think this is a lot _cheerier_ than Kay's do?" asked Lawrie, in Rowan's hand-me-down blue tweeds, of Nicola, in a collarless high-buttoned coat and skirt in a particularly fab deep raspberry colour that had come from, of all places, Colebridge Market. Mrs Marlow had said that it wouldn't wash; Nicola had said that she didn't care, and here she was, in an outfit that had received even Miranda's approbation. "I _said_ you suited demure," she said delightedly, with that joyful chiming note in her speaking voice as well as her singing voice that she'd had ever since she got that amazing scholarship and knew she was off to Yale.

Nicola turned her attention away from Miranda, now planted at the back amongst _friends of the groom_ (though she had, actually, only met Giles twice) and back to Lawrie. "I keep expecting there to be a stage instead of chairs, in that front bit before the altar-gate," she said, dodging the question of Kay's wedding.

"So do I, now you've said it." Lawrie stared forward with interested attention. "Look, that's where Miranda was a Candle Angel, and that's where Lois Sanger..."

"Why d'you have to bring _her_ into it?"

But whatever reply Lawrie might have made was silenced in the beginning trill of notes from the organ. Ginty took off her cardigan to reveal a purple dress that was very nearly backless as well as mini (and, Nicola thought sourly, an invitation to goose-pimples) and sat and basked in the attention it got her. Mrs Marlow was sitting a pew in front, visible only as shoulders and hat; if Ginty put the cardigan back _on_ before the end of the service, Nicola reckoned she might get away with it. Not, actually, that she cared. Nicola turned her prayer-book over in her cold hands (why was it so cold in the Minster, always, when it was nearly summer?) and looked over at all those bright, smiling faces on the other side of the Minster and wondered whether Giles was going to be expected to remember their names. The choir began to process in, the Bishop and his retinue following; a small child on the other side jumped up and down in excitement, and was hushed by a woman saying "_Nein, meinen Kind..._"

Procession. The little Maynards and Rose looked definitely attractive, though Fob looked more bulldog-like than usual; her toffee-brown eyes slid sideways, found Peter, and slid back, so _that_ was all right then. Giles and his Best Man, a tanned, rather fabulous-looking fellow-officer, coming in from the side. _We have come together here in the sight of God, and in the presence of this congregation_. Declarations of Intent. First Reading. Second Reading. Mary-Lou promising to obey in a cheerful, practical tone of voice, as if Giles were holding a lifeboat drill.

With This Ring. And then they were standing up, and Ginty was saying the Lord's Prayer on one side of Nicola in a school-issue singsong gabble, and Lawrie on the other, as it sometimes amused Lawrie to do, as if she genuinely was handing over her life to God.

_Those whom God has joined together_. Third Reading. And then what Nicola found herself thinking of as _final remarks_ from the Bishop, who sounded remarkably jolly about the whole occasion.

Nicola risked a look back over her shoulder, to see whether she could see Patrick; but Patrick, with a bright, interested look on his face, was staring about at the architecture and plainly had no thought of fixing his eyes devotedly on Nicola. It came to her like a stone dropped into cold water, that she would never, quite, come into the firelit centre of Patrick's enthusiasms; she would only ever be in the place between light and shadows, at the edge of the circle.

Processionals, again. Joyful organ music. And then she found herself out at the sunlit West Front, with Lawrie beside her saying _my tiny hands are frozen_ and sticking her hands in Nicola's warm pockets, and the photographer setting off flash-bulbs everywhere, and Chas making a performance of having bought a box of confetti, and Mrs Marlow saying something in a bothered tone of voice that began with _if you think that is in any way appropriate_ to Ginty.

So that was that, then. They were married.

\--

The reception that evening was held in the white and gold wedding-cake rotunda of the ballroom at Meriot Chase, which Mrs Merrick had very firmly offered, and countered all Mrs Marlow's _my dear we couldn't possiblies_ with _of course you can, it's a treat for me to have a party and not have to organise the invitations._ Nicola circulated, making cheery conversation with local worthies like Mrs Prescott. She noticed Fob, no longer in the lemon satin but a skating-looking dress of red velvet with fur trim; she wasn't surprised, the seams of the bridesmaid's dress must have burst. She wouldn't put it altogether past Fob to have been at them with a pair of scissors.

"See that? That's _my doing_, that is," said Lawrie, pointing up at two dark-headed figures standing close together, up in the musicians' gallery.

"Who is it? I can't see. Con and - "

"Miss Grantley. Ted, she calls herself. I pushed Con off onto her. Because, really, I thought she was likely to be the _clingy_ sort, like her Len and that everlasting doctor," confided Lawrie. "And I really can't be doing with that kind of thing," she added in a Mrs Bertie voice. "Can you?"

What Nicola thought was that her sister had been at the champagne; and also, that a bit of clinginess from Patrick wouldn't have _hurt_, all things considered. She was about to remember, like poking a bruise, the way she had felt in the Minster, when Con Maynard's father, tall and blond and very nearly as handsome as Captain Marlow, approached and asked her to dance. Nicola accepted, reassured by the twinkle in his eye, and was led onto the dancefloor. "I say, I'll probably tread on your feet," she admitted. "Will you tell me all about your time in the Navy?"

There seemed to be a _colossal_ number of relatives of Con's who all thought of themselves as relatives of Mary-Lou's as well; Nicola was sure she spent quite half an hour just dancing with Richardsons, though of course it couldn't have been. Then she danced with Lieutenant Trevithic, the best man, who had an astonishing way of making her feel entirely light-footed in his arms. She couldn't work out how he did it. It wasn't the champagne, because the high white-and-gold roof above them wasn't revolving any faster or slower than normal; it must just be a talent, and she told him so. "All that practice with diplomats' clodhoppering wives in Malta, I suppose," she said.

"Well, they make a change from fisheries," he grinned, with that rather fascinating hint of a Cornish accent. "You try dancing a Paul Jones with a full-grown Atlantic cod."

She was almost sorry when the next partner came to claim her. Which was ridiculous, because the next partner was Patrick. She felt the usual faint, small electric shock when his hand touched the small of her back.

"Rowan found me. She's spoken to your father." he said almost at once, as the musicians struck up a waltz. "It's no go."

Nicola was surprised her feet didn't stop, she felt so paralysed with disappointment. "She _did_ say we should talk to Father ourselves."

"She said that to me, too, though I don't think she has too high an idea of my courage. A fine judge of character, your Rowan."

Nicola laid her head briefly against his collarbone, though she wasn't sure whether she was taking comfort _from_ him or comfort _because_ of him. The satin collar of his jacket was worn and soft, like the ribbon edging of a childhood blanket, under her cheek.

"I _am_ so glad I don't have to go through all that _isn't the bride lovely_ waffle with you," he said lightly, over her head. "What I actually thought was that, if anything, your services are _less_ let's-all-water-down-the-language than ours. And that your Fob looked likely to bite the Bishop."

"She's not _my_ Fob. She's Kay's, if she's anybody's."

The whole scene in the ballroom - Ginty laughing as she sat out with Ronnie, Lieutenant Trevithic making himself charming to Rose, the high overexcited voices and the tinkle of champagne flutes and people saying things like _My dear, I thought it all went so well_ was suddenly quite nightmarish, and wholly unendurable. She touched Patrick's hand as one waltz changed to another. "I need some air."

"Air we have at your command," he said, leading her outside into the night that couldn't decide whether to be cold or not, and smelt of cut grass and car-oil. "If milady cares to sit down, there's a particularly fine quality of air on this garden-seat..."

"_Don't_, Patrick." She sat down. She felt almost as if she was going to cry, though of course she wasn't.

"Is it the farm job?" He was kneeling next to her, she vaguely noticed, and rubbing one of her hands between both of his, which mean, she supposed, that she looked perfectly awful and as if she was about to faint. "Well, I won't deny that it'd be an answer to all my prayers. And I do think I could do it. I'd _like_ to have some experience elsewhere - I mean, it's all the same soil, pretty much, but still..."

"A different way of keeping the log-books and washing up the teacups," guessed Nicola.

He looked up at her, bright golden eyes under dark brows and lashes; like the lighted house, she thought suddenly, sheltered under trees and sky. "_Yes, precisely_ the teacups. I really don't see why I should go and be something in the City, which I should _hate_, just to mark time for ten years or so before I'm allowed to come back here. I mean, I can see that I ought to go out and..."

"Seek your fortune?"

"... yes, but it ought to be a _useful_ exile."

"I think you're absolutely right," said Mary-Lou, approaching from the drive.

Nicola looked up, fierce and acid embarrassment washing away all other possible feelings; which was, in some ways, a relief. Mary-Lou sat down next to her, tucking her going-away skirt around her knees. "I know you feel you ought to obey your parents," she was saying earnestly to Patrick, "but honestly, university's a wonderful thing _if it's what you need_, but if it isn't, then you're taking a place away from someone who could make good use of it, and it's no wonder you feel all muddled inside. It's very nice to have a degree behind you, but it's what you're made of that matters, not whether you've got letters after your name. Why, if I'd insisted on a university man, I'd never have found Giles."

"I'm... um... glad you're on our side," said Nicola drearily, not looking at her feelings to see whether she _was_ glad. "But there's not a thing you can do about it."

"Well, that's where your toes turn in," said Mary-Lou cheerfully, "because your father's just taken refuge in Mr Merrick's study, completely dumbstruck, after Theo van Eyck presented him with a pile of medical credentials and bank-books in Dutch, _and_ the address of his man of business, to prove that he can support Ann in the style to which she's become accustomed. I bet if we ask him _now_ and you tell him what you've told me, he'll see things differently."

Patrick was on his feet and making desperate noises about how he really didn't know Captain Marlow all that well.

"All the better you should, then, if you're going to be his farm manager," said Mary-Lou ruthlessly. "Come along. If I'm going to butt in, I may as well do it with both hands and all my heart, as the saying goes! We'll all butt in together!"

\--

Nicola leaned against the wall outside Mr Merrick's study, feeling rather as if she had just escaped a close encounter with a tornado. "I've never seen anything like it," she said frankly.

"I _know_," said Trennels' new farm manager. "I am _so_ glad she's married into your family and not mine. I'd never feel a moment's peace whilst she was in the house."

"You'll be at Trennels with her, don't forget," said Nicola gruffly.

"Yes, but she'll be off on digs and such, _ever_ such a lot." He took her hand again; and then, whilst she was astonished and didn't know what he was about, carried it to his lips, and kissed each finger, precisely. And she'd thought the feeling of his hand in her back set off electrical disturbances. She hadn't at all bargained for how she'd feel at the touch of his lips on her skin. "I do so very love you."

Nicola's mind whirled back to the dance with Lieutenant Trevithic; to the cold, precise moment in the Minster when she'd realised, so she thought, that Patrick didn't love her. Or perhaps, that _she_ didn't love _him_. But it was _Patrick_, and all of her growing-up, and all of the feelings for Trennels and for Meriot Chase, and the hunt, and the pure flute-music clear _rightness_ of the Latin Mass, came with him.

A very adult part of her thoughts, one she hadn't known she possessed, thought it would do him no harm at all _not_ to be sure of her. And she thought that before the end of the evening she would have another dance with Lieutenant Trevithic, just one.

"Do you indeed," she said, not taking her hand away from his. "Let's go and get some champagne. And what on _earth_ does _that's where your toes turn in_ mean, do you suppose?"

**Author's Note:**

> Multos grattas to Owl, as always.


End file.
